Return to Night: A Novel

By Mary Renault

Winner of an MGM prize: A doctor finds love with a talented, handsome younger man—who happens to be her patient
Hilary Mansell is a talented young doctor, but she is unlucky in love and still recovering from losing out on a keenly sought appointment, one that was awarded to none other than her former lover. A new position in the scenic Cotswolds offers the balm of tranquillity. But life proves less than placid when Hilary meets Julian on her hospital rounds. He is attractive, intelligent, and recovering from a riding injury. He is also much younger than Hilary and dealing with an overbearing mother.
The two lovers are captured in unforgettable richness by Mary Renault’s pen. The intimacy of their feelings, the nuances of romance, and the cadence of pitch-perfect dialogue render Return to Night a love story like no other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Dec 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480439771

Mary Renault

Born in London as Eileen Mary Challans in 1905 and educated at the University of Oxford, Mary Renault trained as a nurse at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary. It was there that she met her lifelong partner, fellow nurse Julie Mullard. After completing her training, Renault wrote her first novel, Purposes of Love, in 1937. In 1948, after her novel Return to Night won an MGM prize worth $150,000, she and Mullard immigrated to South Africa. There, Renault wrote the historical novels that would define her career. In 2006, Renault was the subject of a BBC 4 documentary, and her books, many of which remain in print on both sides of the Atlantic, are often sought after for radio and dramatic interpretation. In 2010, Fire From Heaven was shortlisted for the 1970 Lost Booker prize. 

Book preview

Chapter One: THE END OF AN AFFAIR

THE COCKS WERE CROWING in the cool glassy darkness before the dawn. Their cry, thinned by long silent distances, crept faintly through the early chill; ghostly, menacing, full of danger and of promise. From its gray tower halfway up the hillside, the clock of a village church struck five.

Hilary pulled off her white coat, saw that it was splashed with blood, and tossed it into a corner of the floor. On second thoughts, she stirred it with her foot till the bloodstain came uppermost. This, she hoped, might indicate to someone that she did not want to see it again on her next call.

The little changing-room had a high gothic window, almost filling one of the walls, for the place had been adapted from one of the huge unpractical rectories of the 1860s. Hilary flung up the sash, and leaned out into the soft cold Cotswold air. It smelled of dewy grass, of arbutus and of pine. The heaviness of interrupted sleep had been cleared from her brain by concentration, urgency, and a strong cup of the Night Sister’s tea. She continued, for a few moments, to think about the lacerated arm she had just been suturing, and to speculate on its chances of getting back full mobility; then tossed it all away, like the white coat, into a dim background consciousness of a sound job done. The hills were growing black against the eastern skyline. Birds began to chitter, and then, on a note of happy and hesitant surprise, to sing.

Below her the garden, which the Cottage Hospital’s lack of funds had preserved unspoiled in a tangled peace, sloped away downhill, bushes and trees emerging in faint intimations of shape from the thinning night. Under the window where Hilary stood, another window, lit more brightly, sent a pale yellow pathway streaming across the grass of the half-tended lawn. It belonged to the duty room, where, in the last of the lull before the scramble of the morning work began, the night nurses were drowsing over their tea. Carried by the silence, their low voices threw upward, now and again, an audible word or phrase.

"… in Dr. Dent’s time … bit sharp sometimes but ever such fun … Have to get used to it. But you know … seems dead-alive somehow … Now you know what I mean, don’t be … always get that with women doctors … No, I know they can’t, but …"

Hilary pulled in her head from the window and unhooked, mechanically, her tweed driving-coat from behind the door. She shrugged into it and stood still for a minute, her well-kept sensible hands pushed into her deep pockets, standing back a little in her crepe-soled shoes. The shoes, her suit and overcoat, had the casual rightness which age stamps upon good clothes; her face, with its unstressed breeding, impatience and humor, had a kind of allied quality, which promised to become more marked before so very long. She was thirty-four, and, because she had set out in a hurry and without regard for appearances, looked a few years older.

The voices sank to a sleepy blur, and died away in a yawn. Hilary smiled to herself, and got out her cigarette case and lighter. She became conscious of the slight hollowness and sinking which nicotine induces when combined with fatigue and an empty stomach, but continued, obstinately, to smoke and to smile. She recalled to mind, for supplement, a few broad jokes with which she and her fellow-students, confident in their numbers, their enthusiasm, and their youth, had decorated this familiar theme. But the jokes needed someone to cap them; or perhaps it was the wrong hour of the morning.

Even here, she thought. For the last thirty years, to my certain knowledge, and since the place was opened to the best of my belief, the casualty work here has been done by crusted, dyed-in-the-wool G.P.’s. When they get a middling good general surgeon, you might imagine that someone, one solitary human soul, would remark on some kind of impalpable difference. But not they, damn them. Well, what did I expect? There’s just one difference that counts. She remembered at this point another hospital story, the simple but unprintable classic about a woman surgeon and a saw. Even in solitude and at five in the morning, it made her grin faintly. She shut the window, and went downstairs in search of her car.

She found it without the help of her torch, for the darkness had yielded to a gray glimmering twilight. A small keen wind was stirring; she felt cold, and thought with dejection of the two hours, an interval too short for sleep but far too long before breakfast, which stretched ahead. She lived in two rooms of a house which, though friendly, was not her own, and had the usual female taboo against invading someone else’s kitchen even in time of need. Reflecting that such occasional inconveniences were more than balanced by daily comfort and freedom from domestic fuss, she was about to push in the starting button when she noticed an object on the seat. It turned out to be a Thermos flask in a canvas bag. She uncorked it; the incense of good, strong coffee rose like a benevolent djinn.

Hilary drank it, slowly and luxuriously. Her estimate of human nature, and more particularly of her own sex, went up as the coffee went down. However many evenings, she wondered, has Mrs. Clare been leaving this, and quietly removing it in the morning? My last night call was a week ago. After all, I’m only a glorified lodger. The telephone probably disturbs her, too.

There was a thick rug in the back of the car. Deciding that she might as well wait, now, till there was light enough to drive by, she wrapped it round herself, and curled up comfortably, sideways on the seat. The outer and the inner warmth made her body drowsy, while the action of the coffee kept her thoughts stirring. It would be pleasant, she thought, to watch the dawn come up over the valley; a very good reason for staying out here instead of sitting in an armchair in the Night Sister’s office, by a warm fire. Quite good enough. She recalled the politeness of the Night Sister, the politeness of other night sisters in her house surgeon days; the cups of coffee; the conversation, so well-intentioned, only so very slightly strained; the sudden warming and loosening of the atmosphere when one of the men strolled in to dawdle after a late party or an emergency call. All these things she had accepted impersonally, having no wish to expend useful energy in battle with biological or social laws, or with the tradition of centuries. She had, perhaps, dismissed them with too much haste. Since she had broken with David, they had become irritatingly noticeable.

Angrily she twitched at her mind, to disengage it from the too smooth channel into which it still slipped so easily; but this morning it seemed distant and unreal and hardly worth an effort, so after all she let it run.

She had met him three months after her finals, when she had still scarcely got over her pleasure and self-satisfaction at having been offered a house appointment in her own hospital, the only woman kept on. David, who had qualified elsewhere only six months before her, had arrived trailing some kind of hearsay reputation for promise which he lost no time in confirming. It had flattered her when he sought her advice, in preference to anyone else’s, about local etiquette and procedure. (Now, in drowsy and indifferent retrospect, she reflected that he must of course have counted on this reaction, and at the same time gained among the men a reputation for natural acumen, thus killing two birds with one stone.) Having found his feet, he had been less in evidence for a while; but later on there had been an outstandingly good leaving-party, at which his approach had suddenly become much more personal. Within a few more weeks they were lovers.

The affair had gone on for more than a year. They had had nearly everything, community of interest, physical compatibility, good spirits, and the same jokes. The compound of affection and zest which these elements produced they had accepted—for they prided themselves on being realists—as an intelligent manifestation of love. Through the accident of their circumstances, the streak of emulation in them had seemed as natural as all the rest; they did not examine its quality in themselves or in one another, or recognize the implication of David’s careless confidence in his own erratic brilliance, Hilary’s dogged determination to succeed in a field where successful women were challengingly few. Their enjoyment of life, and Hilary’s reserve, made them serious only in abstract discussion, flippant in speaking of their own ambitions, and apt to take conversational color from one another.

Their work happened never to overlap. Hilary was house surgeon on the neurosurgical firm, which was thought to be an enviable chance; David proceeded from pediatrics to gynecology with conscientious efficiency and a boredom which he concealed perfectly from his successive chiefs. Looking back with the fairness of perspective, she found herself admitting that the knowledge of being half a step ahead of him had added something to her fondness on more occasions than one.

It had been Sanderson, the neurosurgeon, who had told her, before it got about, that Ossian Bradford would soon be looking for a new second assistant. It was the best appointment in the hospital which anyone without a Fellowship could hope to expect; Bradford was a chest surgeon, a bold and successful innovator, who would undoubtedly lead his branch in a few years, and to have worked with him was already something of a hallmark. Sanderson was his personal friend. Hilary knew that he had liked her work; and the significance with which he had spoken had conveyed something stronger than a hint.

She said nothing about it to anyone: partly because she wanted to surprise David, partly from a superstition that premature brag would spoil her luck, partly because it meant too much. Another reason, and the strongest, she had not recognized; she could not tolerate the thought of admitting to him that she had tried for it and failed. Theirs was the kind of relationship in which people pride themselves on a certain toughness; and, because for her it was also the first, she had never asked herself whether she was following her own instincts or David’s lead. It could scarcely be said of him that he had a horror of sentimentality; he regarded it rather as a remote kind of mental slum, of which one had vaguely heard. Her training and surroundings had made her ready to accept these values without a struggle, and without asking herself whether her definition of sentimentality was becoming more wholesale than her temperament had meant it to be.

It was just a month later that David strolled into her room and said, Hullo, poppet. Did I once hear you say you’d bought Ossie’s book?

Yes. Hilary picked it up from the table—she had spent all her spare time on it for weeks—and shook out her notes from between its pages. What do you want to look up?

What I really want to do, if you can spare it for a couple of days, is to read the darn thing. He’s just offered me Creighton’s job so I feel it may be expected. He bent his stooping, aquiline head over the pages. If you’re using it for anything, he added. I dare say I could run over it tonight.

Hilary said quite naturally. Keep it as long as you like, I’ve done with it. Nice work, David. Realization filtered in gradually, and was not complete till she had finished speaking. Very nice work.

Hard work, said David, is what it looks too much like to me. However, it’s a thing to have done, I suppose. She knew he was not posing; if this had not fallen at his feet, he would have been sure of its equivalent elsewhere.

Peering at a diagram, he went on indifferently, I hope a couple of years will about see me shut of surgery, and getting on with something. A century from now, of course, surgeons will be almost period survivals. All this glamour surrounding the theater is just a temporary breakdown in proportion. Atavistic, really. The physician, the biologist, and the chemist will be where they always belonged, and tucked away somewhere in decent obscurity, like the mortuary, will be a sordid little hole, still known by courtesy as the theater, in which a seedy breakdown gang will slice up the few failures in the minimum of publicity. ‘Old So-and-so’s getting past it. Don’t say I told you, but two of his cases have gone to the theater in less than six months.’ That’s how it will be. … What’s the name of that Swede who does the fancy pneumonectomies, doesn’t seem to be here.

I can’t remember, said Hilary. She had little concentration to spare from the sudden, inescapable knowledge that she had never loved him; that, at the moment, to keep from hating him was exacting from her her last reserves of decency and control.

She would have done better to have kept this intimation in sight; but, imperfectly knowing herself (she had always been busy), she had dismissed it with shame as the temporary effect of disappointment and shock. So the internal pressure had risen without vent; and the decisive quarrel, when it came, had sprung from a trifle, a pathetic business about some slides which neither had remembered to put away and which had, in consequence, been broken; a squalid bickering, not leaving even the satisfaction of a large gesture behind.

It’s typical of a man, Hilary had brought forth, to her own shocked surprise, from the boiling within her, to crash through to every objective by plain selfishness, and take for granted it’s just superior ability.

David had learned early the art of keeping his temper. He looked at her with his eyebrows raised, paused for effect, and spoke. I’m sorry, he said. I always supposed you were competent to hold your own as a human entity, without having resort to the squalling apologetics of feminism. You make me feel rather at a loss.

It had been as if a nerve in her brain had been touched with something red-hot. From that moment, they were finished.

They had avoided a crisis on major issues; both would have felt it to be embarrassing and melodramatic. They had behaved with restraint and with what had seemed, at the time, to be economy of emotion. Hilary had approved of this, as she had believed she approved of their undemonstrativeness while they were still together. She was not analytical of herself. There had never been much time.

Her intellect and abilities were another thing. These she had studied with the attention she gave to other tools of her calling. She examined her failure, and drew, impartially as she believed, the unpalatable conclusions. Determination, industry, good organization of a good second-class brain, had done their best for her. She was now at the level where they had to be set against the male powers of intellectual and imaginative endurance, the male reserve of stamina for a mental sprint; and she recognized the difference, fully, for the first time. It shocked her with a sense of fundamental injustice. Her relationship with David, which might have resolved everything, had lacked the single essential ingredient; but she did not reflect on this. She merely left the hospital.

In a kind of spite against herself and life, she had thrown herself away on this country practice in a small Cotswold market town. It carried a fair-sized panel, a sprinkling of private patients in the neighborhood, and, one week in a rota of three, emergencies at the Cottage Hospital. By the time she had been there three months, she found herself counting the days to the third week, which sometimes passed without any emergency at all. The cut tendon had been the most interesting event since her arrival.

Hilary stretched herself out of the rug, and, after half an hour’s sheltered inactivity, at once shivered with cold. It became suddenly obvious to her that the only possible time filler was a walk. She let in the clutch; the noise of the accelerating engine seemed shattering in the stillness.

The car twisted downhill, between hedges in which the scent of the may was still quenched by dew and the chill of dawn; dropped into shadow in the valley, and climbed again. She turned off from her homeward road, and, slowing to an easy twenty, began to meander over the hills, looking about for a place to park.

She found it at a white, five-barred gate into a larch wood, whose trees, thinly spaced, let in the sun. The gate gave on to a ride, evidently private land; but it was too early to feel very serious about trespassing, and, having had a country childhood, she could judge that the place was not heavily preserved. She opened the gate, closing it conscientiously behind her.

The grass of the ride had the extreme velvety fineness which generations of rabbits create about their ancestral homes. It was a good morning for them; their sentinel ears pointed her approach, their white scuts bounced before her, and their jaunty young, losing their heads, took the longest way across the track before popping down into the green. Between padded mats of needles under the larches, bluebells lay in cloudy lakes and streams. Exercise was already making her warm.

The ride gave out in a clearing, stubbled with cut bracken; through the rusty stalks the hard new shoots were uncurling in fantastic crooks and croziers and little fans, mixed with sparse hardy bluebells. The sun was beginning to have heat in its brightness. Hilary let herself down onto a heap of old bracken, and sighed with animal content. Her tweeds melted into the landscape like the protective coloring of a partridge or a hare; she felt, like one of them, comfortably and inconspicuously at home. The warmth began to make her healthily sleepy. She shut her eyes.

It might have been after five minutes, or thirty-five, that she opened them again, with a start. Among the light rustlings and cracklings of small life in the undergrowth, a new noise, rhythmic and strong, was growing louder, the thud over turf of a cantering horse. It came from the ride she had left, facing her now across the clearing. She did not disturb herself about it; the wood was too dense behind her for anyone to ride that way, and, sunk in her form of bracken, it was unlikely that she would be seen. The hoofbeats slowed to a walk; a stick cracked quite near. In a dim curiosity to know whose solitude she was sharing, she raised herself a little.

They came out into the lake of sunlight in the clearing, a big light dun, and a rider sitting loosely and at ease. Hilary stared, forgetting her trespass and the apologies she might need to improvise. She felt a little detached from reality. The light, the setting, the hour, seemed a theatrical extravagance, exaggerating, needlessly, what was already excessive, the most spectacularly beautiful human creature she had ever seen. Because her habit of mind had made her hostile to excess, she thought irritably, It’s ridiculous. It’s like an illustration to something.

He had not seen her. If he came nearer, she would find that distance had been playing tricks. When he passed near enough for her to hear the creak of leather, she still did not quite believe in him. His boots and breeches, which were old and good, were topped off with a blue cotton shirt open at the neck; a carelessness natural to the hour, but transformed by its wearer to something traditional, the basic costume of equestrian romance. He was slender, but strongly boned. His hair was so black that the brightening sun did not touch it with brown; his face had the hard, faintly hollow planes in which art seems to have lost interest between the fourteenth century and the twentieth, the lines which invite not paint or marble, but stone or bronze. But sculpture would have missed the contrast of a fair skin and gray eyes with the blue-black hair, the slanted brows, and lashes which were emphatic even from that distance away. His grace in the saddle, flexible and erect, was something separable from good horsemanship, as if it would have cost him a deliberate effort to make any movement which was ugly or out of line. His head was up—he and the horse were getting their breath—and this chance pose gave him a look of medieval challenge and adventure which went with all the rest. It was fantastic that anyone unself-conscious and alone could look so faultlessly arranged.

He looked quite unaware of himself, and happy. His long mouth had the rare mingling of sweetness and arrogance which can last only for a few years while youth holds them in suspension; for he was very young, perhaps twenty or so, perhaps not out of his teens. It was hard to say; his beauty was of that mind-arresting kind which silences other questions. Now, his face reflected only movement and the morning. Two magpies, scared up from the edge of the wood, flew suddenly out against the trees. He lit with a flash of pleasure as vivid as their flight, then touched his horse with his knee, and trotted away into an open aisle of the larches. The fallen needles muffled the sound, so that he seemed to vanish like a legend, leaving the sadness of mortality in his wake.

Hilary sat up, and brushed bits of bracken smartly from her tweeds. With amused impatience, she dusted off also the impression from her mind. She naturally distrusted, and felt ill at ease with, physical perfection in either sex; not from envy—for she seldom troubled to improve on her own moderate good looks—but because she found it a confusing irrelevance, camouflaging the personality which interested her more. Within her own observation, the principal function of beauty had been to make a fool of intelligence, in one or two instances a tragic fool. The way to enjoy it was like this, impersonally, at a distance, for what it was worth; and she felt grateful for the absence of introductions, which had doubtless preserved her from hearty, illusion-shattering banalities about the clemency of the morning and the prospects of golf.

These reflections carried her back to her car. As she drove home the air was still sweet and cool, but the early magic had dispersed; it was not sunrise but day, and already there was white dust on the road. Her mind began to travel on to the day’s work, and the glimpse in the larch wood only remained there as an incidental part of the pleasures of early rising, like dew and young rabbits, which in general cause one to say, Why don’t I do this more often? while knowing that one will not.

Chapter Two: A PATIENT’S SUBCONSCIOUS

HILARY SAT AT THE COTTAGE TABLE, holding a little glass pipette like a fountain-pen filler, and gazing down into a cardboard shoe box. In the box was cotton wool lined with a clean handkerchief of her own, and, embedded in the handkerchief, a tiny waxen face, no bigger than the palm of her hand. The face was full of an ancient ennui; the eyes were closed; the mouth was shut too, in remote obstinacy, passively resisting the pipette which Hilary was trying stealthily to introduce to it. With her fingertip she drew down the lower jaw, revealing a cavity much the size of the moon on a thumbnail. A few drops of brandy-and-water trickled in. The mouth sketched a grimace of languid, but definite, resentment, and out of it came a cry, thinner than the mew of a newborn kitten. Moving out from under the handkerchief in undirected protest, a hand, perfect and slender like an adult’s in miniature, closed round one of Hilary’s fingers and let go again in fastidious distaste.

From the bed against the wall a dim voice said, Was that her crying?

Yes, said Hilary cheerfully. And about time, too.

I couldn’t hardly hear it.

Give her time. She’s not much over three pounds, by the look of her.

Will I rear her, doctor?

I hope so. But not here, you know. She’ll need everything rather special. Nurse has gone to ring for the ambulance to take both of you to hospital.

Oh, dear, oh, doctor. Whatever will my husband say?

Your husband has been very sensible about it. He wants to do what’s best for both of you. Or if he doesn’t, she added to herself, he can be learning.

And what’s to become of the children, that’s what I can’t see, and Mother with her leg bad again.

We’ll fix something. You’ve just got to concentrate on this one now. Would you like to see her?

The woman on the bed gave a harassed sigh; but her head craned a little over the worn sheet. Hilary carried the shoe box over, and tilted it. We mustn’t uncover any more of her. They feel the cold.

Between the folds of the handkerchief, the tiny unmoving mask in the box lay with closed mouth and eyes, withdrawn and refusing. It had nothing to say to the life that had been thrust on it seven weeks too soon. Its arms and legs were folded in its prenatal posture; its whole grain of being seemed bent on affirming that the unpleasant fact of birth had not happened, or, if it had, could be decently ignored. Its composure made Hilary’s efforts toward its survival feel intrusive.

The mother’s face puckered, and a tear slipped down her cheek. The little love, she whispered. You do what’s best, doctor. Anything so’s I don’t lose her, bless her heart.

Hilary put down the box on the table, and went over to the window, in which tall geraniums excluded half the small available light and air. Looking out, she reflected that Mrs. Kemp had three small children already, one of them backward, and a husband who did little for her beyond ensuring that events like this were frequent and regular. She had tried to stop this one, as Hilary knew, by every means short of the criminal, and now—How on earth, she wondered, does Nature manage to pull this trick?

The rattle of a parked cycle sounded outside; the district nurse came up the path and into the room.

The ambulance will be along in a few minutes, doctor. It was Matron herself I spoke to. She was ever so pleased to know you were here, because she was just going to ring you. Would you be able to come straight away, she said, because there’s an urgent casualty just come in, a head injury, she said, and the patient’s unconscious.

Thank you, Nurse. I’ll go along now, if my instruments are boiled. Hilary stood up briskly, shocked next moment by her own feelings of pleasure and excitement. In the days when she had worked for Sanderson, this would have been simply a typical moment in a packed unremitting routine. Grumbling mechanically, she would have picked up the internal telephone—any scalp lacerations, any bleeding from the nose or ears, any response to painful stimuli? She almost turned to ask the district nurse these questions, but stopped herself in time.

Her instruments were ready. On her way out through the kitchen, she stopped for a few parting admonitions to the husband, by way of striking while the iron was hot. He lowered at her in sullen resentment—exactly, Hilary thought, as if I were responsible. By this time he has probably convinced himself that I am. Really, these men.

The Cottage Hospital was in a flutter, with the Matron and Sister in violent circulation; Hilary, who liked smooth-running machinery, felt her irritability increased. The Matron was competent enough in her sphere, but the rare advent of something both acute and complex was apt to go to her head. Probably, Hilary thought, it gets under my skin because I’m going the same way. In reaction, she affected an easy social manner, which put the Matron on her dignity and produced a certain amount of simmering-down.

It emerged that the history of the patient’s injury was unknown, for he had been found lying in the road and had not since recovered consciousness. She gathered that the signs of gross damage to the brain were so far absent. Nurse Jones, the Matron added, has just finished undressing him.

Hilary stopped herself from saying, Well, I hope she hasn’t been rolling him about. Since her rustication she had trained herself out of many exigencies; but Nurse Jones, a plump china-eyed blonde, still seemed to her less intelligent than any citizen at large had a right to be. This opinion she had concealed less perfectly than she imagined; with the result that in her presence Nurse Jones was shaken out of what simple wit she had. Hilary knew this; found it shaming and infuriating; and began every fresh encounter with good intentions.

The Matron led her to a small single-bedded ward on the ground floor, one generally reserved for the dying. The door stood open, a screen across it inside. Nurse Jones came out of it, a large enamel bowl of soapy water in her hands. Seeing Hilary and the Matron, she pulled up sharply, and the water slopped over the edge of the bowl.

I don’t think, said Hilary, that I should have bathed him just yet, Matron. Is there much shock?

The Matron, who had not ordered a bath but had forgotten to be explicit, said, Nurse, you should have known better than to have bathed this patient. I left that to your common sense. Don’t you realize that cases like this are very shocked?

With the bowl wobbling in her hands, Nurse Jones began to stammer, I didn’t do much, Matron. I thought, as I was admitting him—in case his feet were dirty or anything, you know. But he was quite clean. I didn’t do much. I’ll just go and get him a bedgown.

You should have had it ready, Nurse, before you prepared to bath him.

Yes, Matron. I—

Well, get it now.

Yes, Matron.

That will be all right for the moment, Hilary said. I shall want him stripped to go over his reflexes. Seeing the Sister bearing down urgently upon them she added, thankfully, Don’t let me keep you if you’re busy, Matron; I’ll come and talk him over with you when I’ve had a look.

Nurse Jones had set down her bowl. Eager to restore her status with a display of zeal, she darted ahead of Hilary into the room, and flung back the bath blanket which lay loosely on the bed. Hilary, following her, noted with speechless exasperation